Kate Ceberano
Australian Made: Live
Rogers & Ceberano/Universal
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In an era where the concept of the “live album” has often been reduced to a contractual filler or fan-only curio, Kate Ceberano’s Australian Made: Live detonates the notion entirely. Spanning 28 tracks and anchored in the immediacy of performance, it is less a greatest hits revue than a deeply considered act of cultural preservation. This is Ceberano not just as singer, but as archivist, interpreter, and witness—reasserting the place of Australian music within the broader, often anglocentric narrative of pop history.
The opening salvo is deliberate and telling. The Models’ “Out Of Mind Out Of Sight” is buoyant, exuberant, a reminder of the bright edges of ’80s Australian pop. But then, with barely a breath, she plunges into Silverchair’s “Straight Lines”—a work of millennial grit and melancholy—before tightening the screws with Ed Kuepper’s (The Saints) “The Way I Made You Feel.” This sequencing alone collapses decades into moments, revealing the connective tissue between movements in Australian music that are too often treated as isolated chapters.
There is, of course, the impossibility of full coverage here—not simply because 28 songs defy exhaustive commentary, but because Ceberano’s interpretations demand an unmediated encounter. Some art is better met without advance description, and she knows it. Still, there are performances that refuse to slip by unnoticed. Her “Quasimodo’s Dream” by The Reels is devastating: a haunting evocation of youthful longing, prefaced by a personal story that reframes the song’s lyricism into lived experience. The effect is alchemical—Ceberano doesn’t just sing the song, she temporarily owns it.
Her own canon is not treated as an indulgence, but as an essential thread in this national tapestry. “Pash” glimmers with the seductive precision of her pop years, “Brave” soars with undimmed optimism, and “Bedroom Eyes” retains its unflappable sophistication. The I’m Talking mash-up—“Do You Wanna Be / Trust Me / Holy Word”—is less nostalgia than reclamation, repositioning those songs not as relics, but as enduring artifacts of Australian dance-funk innovation.
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The scope of the project is vast, drawing on an eclectic roll call of Australian giants: Divinyls, INXS, Icehouse, John Farnham, Split Enz, The Church, Paul Kelly, Renee Geyer. Yet Ceberano’s gift is in subverting the weight of reverence. Her homage to Geyer with “It’s A Man’s World” is commanding but never imitative; Sia’s “Chandelier” becomes a tour de force, less about mimicking vocal acrobatics and more about inhabiting the emotional fracture at its core. Both are emblematic of Ceberano’s approach—respect for the source, but an unflinching insistence on authorship.
The final word belongs to Paul Kelly’s “Cake And The Candle.” Sparse and haunting, it lands as both benediction and quiet reminder: that endurance in music is not about constant reinvention, but about holding fast to an unassailable center. Ceberano understands this instinctively.
What elevates Australian Made: Live beyond a mere exercise in tribute is its curatorial intelligence. In lesser hands, the material might lapse into rote homage; here, it becomes a living document. Ceberano constructs an implicit argument—that Australian music is not a provincial subset of some larger Anglo-American tradition, but a self-sustaining ecosystem with its own lexicon, its own mythology, its own scars. Her career, stretching across more than four decades, has always resisted easy categorization, moving from jazz to pop to funk to soul with an ease that belies the discipline beneath. That same fluency is at work here, reframing songs across genres and decades as if they were always meant to share the same stage.
In today’s music industry—where algorithmic precision too often dictates taste—Ceberano’s refusal to chase trends feels almost radical. Authenticity, for her, is not a marketing hook but a reflex. Australian Made: Live is a document of that authenticity in motion: generous, unguarded, and fiercely intelligent.
This is more than an album. It is an assertion that Australian music matters—locally, historically, and globally. And it is a reminder, delivered with the force of someone who has lived inside this culture for a lifetime, that preserving our musical identity is an act not of nostalgia, but of necessary, ongoing resistance.
Notable Tracks: “Brave” | “Cake And The Candle” | “Chandelier” | “It’s A Man’s World”
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